This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 2nd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In an election year dominated by personalities and personal attacks,

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has focused his energy more on poverty and policy

responses to it.

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses why. Paul Ryan in lieu of spending a lot of time going around stumping for the Republican nominee,

something you might expect the well-regarded Republican

Speaker of the House to do.

He's been talking a lot about poverty and specifically his plans to or his hopes rather I suppose to deal with

poverty as a problem in the United States. This has been a long standing priority for Paul Ryan.

He's long had an interest in poverty and in sort of creating a Republican brand of anti-poverty effort,

kind of a new type of republicanism when it comes to poverty.

He recently brought out another one of his blueprints.

He's been churning these out every couple of months.

He brought one out on poverty a couple months ago and he's

also been flirting with other proposals on poverty as they've been put forward

it been Congress most recently an idea that's come out of the Black Caucus for targeting poverty aid more to areas

with high poverty levels.

To what extent has he detailed in the past ideas or programmatic changes that he would make to deal with sort of the

trap that exists within federal and state welfare programs?

Well, first you have to give Ryan props for recommending or for recognizing three big problems.

One is that the current social welfare system doesn't work very well.

...